Summer biathlon out-takes. Photos by Victoria Saddleman

I ran into a friend in town the other day, parking her bike outside the grocery store. She looked refreshed, her hair was wet – she looked like she was on vacation. She wasn’t. (She’s a mom, so it’s arguable that she’s never on vacation…) “Just finished my Pemberton triathlon,” she joked. She’d ridden her bike down the hill to One Mile Lake, run around the lake, swam across it, and pedalled back into town.

You don’t have to be an IRONMAN, or have a $10,000 bicycle to pull this off.

All you need is summer.

When I asked Victoria Saddleman if she had a recent photo to share, she offered these two – snapped while out swimming and later out for a jog.

I grew up identifying as “not sporty.” In high school PE class, the teacher would always select two captains and ask them to select their team-mates, one at a time. Eventually, the non-sporty ones among us made it a point of pride to choose each other, so we didn’t feel like the losers. I also inherited this idea that wellness, fitness, sportiness, even PE, was for the naturally gifted athletes. And the rest of us could just bumble along, laugh at ourselves, and read books as our “leisure” activity.

But we all have bodies. And as the wonderful Caitlin Moran says, “all bodies are good bodies.” And we all need to tend to ourselves.